>2012

Looks like I haven’t even blogged in December. Shit, man. I think I’m kind of losing interest in real life.

My good

If you weren’t living in a cave you should know that I’ve been fairly interested in random number generators. Not just the pseudo- kind, of course, but I can’t really do much research about real RNGs without some proper funding. And sufficient motivation, because data collection is tedious. (The real reason is more like because I’m really clumsy with objects, and handling a hardware RNG so much probably isn’t going to make it last long.)

I recently torrented TAOCP (feeling guilt, will buy the book another time), just for volume 2 actually, because Seminumerical Algorithms. Which contains a chapter on pseudorandom number generators. It’s fairly interesting, but the age of the book precludes inclusion of more recent (but still rather dated) algorithms like ISAAC, but I’m pretty fine with just studying about simpler RNGs (by which I actually mean PRNG, but that’s an extra letter) if that means I get more solid (instead of empirical) results.

Summarising from the book, a sequence can be defined as random if every string of every length appears with the same probability. Hold on, this sounds just like the definition of normality… yeah. There’s actually a hardly-known RNG that uses the digits of a proven-to-be-normal-in-binary number, with the seed being where the digit reading starts. But there are simpler normal numbers. Considering for now just normality in base 2, a binary analogue of the Champernowne constant, could theoretically function as a perfect random number generator, but the obvious flaw is obvious:

The seed is essentially the random number itself. In other words, this is effectively like using a very large random number table. Sure, it’s random, but only asymptotically; it’s impossible to have a uniform distribution over the nonnegative integers, so there’ll inherently be some bias, and therefore predictability given sufficiently many digits of output, by autocorrelating and stuff.

(Last edited on February 24, 2011 at 2:08 pm. DRAFT QUEUE CLEARING.)

Passwords

I think I’ve got one post on the old blog about a new password scheme. I haven’t really thought much of it since then, but considering how often passwords are getting leaked nowadays this is kinda important. You should already know I use a dictionary password. I don’t really give a shit because there’s nothing to my name and therefore there’s nothing to lose. That’s what I say now, but I think I’ll shit bricks if any of my accounts get broken into. (Figuratively of course.)

I currently can’t be arsed to find the old post, and I don’t really remember what’s in it because it’s been so damn long since I wrote it, so I’ll just go by memory. Currently, if you’re trying to log in to a web site you’ll have to give the web site your password. HTTPS provides authentication and encryption, so there isn’t much problem, until you realise that many sites also require your email address to sign up, and if you’re a lazy piece of shit you’ll probably be using the same password for both accounts, and the site you just signed up for can use that password to access your email.

Of course, being lazy, you want to use the same password everywhere, or something to that effect. What do you do? One way is to keep a file with proper cryptographically random passwords, and encrypt that with your favourite insecure password. Programs exist that do this for you. It’s still a suboptimal solution though, because you have to keep that file. It’s kind of like the issue I have with Bitcoins. Generally I don’t bother with backups (hurr durr), but these are actually worth something more valuable than my time. Also, those crypto-random passwords are completely unrelated to the master password, so if you lose the file somehow you lose everything.

Currently passwords are usually stored salted and hashed on the server (note: depending on how not-retarded the person coding the server is, this may or may not be the case)

(Last edited on July 19, 2011 at 12:10 pm. DRAFT QUEUE CLEARING.)

Let me laugh harder

Here be the Archive Team’s take on file formats. (Nope, not going to copy that. Chances are, WordPress.com will go down before AT does, and that’s a long time in the future.)

I find it pretty ridiculous. Archive Team, of all people, suggesting plain text, and PNG and SVG on the same page? Along with Ogg (presumably Vorbis) and AVI? I call bullshit. Plain text is an understandable choice, because even if a file was sent to an alien civilisation, with reference to real written/printed text, it’s very possible (and not hard) to decipher it using frequency analysis. (Assuming English, of course.) As for pictures, Windows bitmap and PNM look like the best candidates, for obvious reasons; these are again easily reverse engineered. (Well, BMP not so much because of all the random headers, but generally they’re unimportant.)

Now, Gzip (and compression formats in general) is something that cannot be reverse engineered easily. How many compression formats are in common use today? There’s Gzip, Bzip2, Zip, 7z, Xz, RAR and maybe a bunch of slightly more niche formats. There’s no way to define the “best” one to use for everything: Gzip has low encode/decode requirements, but isn’t supported by default on Windows (lol). Bzip2 compresses well, but isn’t supported on Windows either. Xz has even better compression, but again isn’t supported on Windows, not to mention Xz is actually pretty niche and apart from a certain free software distributor (lolgnu) nobody ever seems to use it. Zip is supported almost everywhere, and is kind of the de facto standard, except that this standard magically evolves over time. Support for encryption and non-Deflate compression algorithms (including Wavpack, even) were just added in relatively recently. 7z is… well, some people use it. As for RAR, lolderp.

The only time-proof compression format is to have none at all. This is feasible for text, pictures and audio, but video… that’s hard. One hour of 24 fps 1920×1080 4:2:0 8-bit video already takes up ~75 MB per second, or ~268 GB per hour.

(Last edited on September 9, 2011 at 8:53 pm. DRAFT QUEUE CLEARING. Also this post is at least partially factually inaccurate, iirc, which was the reason I didn’t finish it.)

Queues

I believe there was a post titled “Cues” not too long ago. Well that was a post about me ranting about shit, and just two posts back I mentioned I keep private stuff private, which is the only reason I decided to slap password protection on it. It’s important k. Anyway, back to queues.

It’s not too uncommon to encounter a situation where multiple people are trying to use a resource that can only be used by at most one person at any time, and normally different people will hog the resource for a differing amounts of times (but assume it’s constant regardless of whatever position in the queue they’re in). Now suppose how pissed off (because everyone wants to be first) a person is roughly proportional to the ratio of the waiting time to the execution time, and you want to minimise the overall pissed-off-ness of everybody. (Theoretically, optimising this would be roughly equivalent to having the wait:execution ratio the same for everybody.)

First-come-first-serve is the general strategy used in real life. It also sucks. Without a context regarding the order, this isn’t any different from a random ordering.

Another one that comes to mind is to just sort, and have people with faster tasks be earlier in the queue. This unfortunately leads to a problem where if more people with fast tasks join the queue as the resource is being used, the slowest task never gets done. It also violates the

(Last edited on September 17, 2011 at 1:45 am. DRAFT QUEUE CLEARING. I also have no idea how I was going to finish that sentence.)

Web browsers have horrible download managers

Yeah, it’s not really like we should be expecting a complete download manager in web browsers, but holy shit they suck. IE’s is the most fabulous. By that I mean worst. If I’m not mistaken it’s still using that ancient interface of showing a pop-up then querying a download location, and giving some retarded-looking progress bar if you use Windows 7. (Herp, did anyone actually think Windows 7′s progress bar looks nice? Seriously, it looks horrible.) It’s horrible, because that’s all it can do. It’s the bare minimum a download manager can offer— wait, you can’t really call that a “manager”, if all it does it download. IE is the most deficient in this regard, assuming I’m not subconsciously biasing against it from memory (because I don’t actually use it).

Chrome’s is somewhat derpy. The way downloads are initiated is stupid, to begin with, and while that’s not technically part of the download manager, it affects the downloading process, so I shall describe it. Apparently, what Chrome does is if it encounters something with an unknown type (using MIME, presumably), it’ll treat that file as something to be downloaded, and automatically download it unless you change some setting. It’s dumb, because this can also happen when a server running PHP momentarily derps up and doesn’t set the MIME type or something, leaving the browser to extrapolate type information from the extension (which for the purposes of this example is assumed to be “.php”). And then it leads to magical clutter of the downloads folder with random HTML files with a .php extension that seemingly came out of nowhere, from the point of view of the user. Of course, that’s not the only cause; generally, random server derps can cause Chrome to download all sorts of things. And I believe it should even be possible for a (malicious) server to force Chrome to download random junk, with the only indication being the download bar at the bottom (which is pretty obvious, unless such an attack uses small files that download quickly, but that wouldn’t do much harm).

Now on to the actual download manager. Like the rest of the main Chrome interface, it’s rather minimalistic. But it’s an actual manager in the sense that it can handle more than one download in the same interface. And it even allows pausing and resuming downloads (depending on whether the server allows it, of course)! Yeah, but that’s all there is to it. Now, if you try to cancel a partial download, it’ll delete the file. It makes sense, given that Chrome is retarded enough to automatically download everything. With Firefox this is different, but wait for that.

If I remember correctly the last time Firefox’s download manager interface changed significantly was from the 2.0 → 3.0 transition. (And that was a long time ago.) Unlike Chrome, Firefox’s download manager goes in a separate window.

And then at this point I got sufficiently distracted while writing this post. To be continued. (Posting it publicly first to prevent it from getting stuck in the draft queue (23 posts and counting) forever.)

(Last edited on October 9, 2011 at 2:06 am. DRAFT QUEUE CLEARING.)

Weekly opinion blog post

Oh great just as I type out the title I forget what I was going to rant about.

Anyway, just going to rant about something (else).

Gigantic TV screens are a dumb idea. For that matter, I also hate the standard 16:9 aspect ratio. It’s unnecessarily complicated; while 9 and 16 are both nice square numbers, the ratio deviates too much from being square, or even √2. (Lol HTML sqrt tags, haven’t done those in a while.) I don’t see any benefits to using 16:9 (in landscape) over 8:5 (also known as 16:10 by people too stupid to divide by two).

(Last edited on October 26, 2011 at 7:47 pm. DRAFT QUEUE CLEARING.)

Drafted

Opinion dump post, because I have a lot of opinions, apparently. A lot of them seem to be mostly unfounded though, not sure why.

Web browsers shipped with operating systems should never have plugins enabled by default. Especially with badly written plugins. Okay, it’s 2011 already, and all browsers worth their shit have some form of plugin sandboxing. That’s fine and all, but it doesn’t really limit the damage plugins can do. You know, shit like nuking the home directory. To my knowledge most Gnome-based Linux distros ship with a certain retarded media player also known as Totem. Totem is shit, partly because it made by Gnome devs. And also partly because Gstreamer is shit. Seriously, why do people even use Gstreamer? FFmpeg Libav is a much better library to use; you lose extensibility, but that’s only important for people who care about trivial shit like using an MP3 decoder legally. And somewhat less trivial shit like separating the working and non-working decoders… except, why would you even be using a non-working decoder? Anyway, Gstreamer sucks and so does Totem. And Totem comes with a plugin (NPAPI, I believe) that’s by extension also shit and likely a security risk just for existing. I also find no use in having a media player extension embedded into the browser when its interface is that horrible. You know, these guys are the same people who think that pressing the left and right arrow keys should seek in different amounts. You can’t trust them to make a sane UI. Even Firefox’s internal video player has a better interface (except it uses pixmaps instead of vector graphics and doesn’t scale, durr). Then there’s also the more common (on Windows) Java, Flash, Adobe Reader, etc. plugins… let’s just say they don’t really have a good reputation for being secure.

Of course, plebs exist. The same kind of people who would install fifty different antivirus programs, all running in the background simultaneously, along with twenty toolbars in IE, wonder why their computer is running slow, and install even more antivirus programs. Honestly, these people shouldn’t be touching computers. My Firefox/Minefield/Nightly UI has been minimalistic ever since about 2009, and some people just cannot resist ricing their UIs, but it’s just so ugly. It’s understandable to have toolbars installed if they provide useful functionality. But they usually don’t. The same probably applies to IE, except its UI is already ugly and so it can’t be helped. Actually that explains a lot. IE users have no sense of aesthetic.

And about people touching computers. I really don’t like how everybody’s trying to make UIs more intuitive. Naively, this seems like a good idea. Unfortunately the only thing I’ve seen coming out of this is people refusing to learn more about how computers work, which leads to retardation everywhere. You might claim I’m being elitist, and I’m not going to deny that. The way users are treating computers as black boxes that do what they want to do is disturbing. A lack of knowledge about software/hardware workings also harm advocacy movements, such as the free software movement. Yeah, four years on and I still believe in that crap. But it’s almost funny how Stallman’s whining about the evils proprietary software can inflict have somehow managed to come true, even though back then people just thought he was exaggerating.

Elaborate ceremonies are the cancer killing society

X is the cancer killing Y etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum.

On to the topic. Tomorrow (as I write; it’s 11:06 pm now and I don’t think I’ll finish before midnight by which it’d be tomorrow and hence “today”) is the NUS High convocation / graduation ceremony / whatever it is now. Honestly I don’t give a shit about this. It falls nicely into the “elaborate ceremony” category because, well, it’s a ceremony, and it’s more elaborate than necessary. The extent of lack of care I have towards this is actually not very low, because I have yet to decide whether I’ll turn up tomorrow (in other words this is the one thing on my mind that’s preventing me from properly enjoying my Japanese cartoons), but the extent to which I feel like attending this either as a student or a mere spectator (yes, this is a possibility I’m not ruling out) is rather low. Nay, negligible.

Why am I saying it’s more elaborate than necessary? Because the ceremony itself isn’t necessary. Okay, so we get some big names coming (was it the minister of education? I forget because I just don’t care enough to remember), but so what? I don’t really feel much attachment to school; sure, NUS High was a pretty cool place, but it wasn’t so much the employed staff as the students who flocked here because it has “Mathematics and Science” right there in the name and it seemed like “the cool thing to do” at the time.

I’m not sure how many people regretted their decision; I don’t, even with all this dissatisfaction I have towards the school. Something about bad not implying not best, yeah. As someone with an high level of autism (I bet if people didn’t give me special attention I’d be acting even more like the stereotypical autist), being in this school has relieved me of things I’d have to do if I went to a mainstream school. This is something that I’ve been pondering about for a very long time (well, almost 6 years, if you’ll have that). This might not have been an entirely good thing. Ms Sie called me up some time ago to have a talk with me about certain issues. One thing she pointed out was that I rarely speak up about my problems. I know this. I’ve known this my entire life.

In fact, I try to avoid direct human interaction as much as possible. Doesn’t really matter who they are, unless I have already established through past experiences that they’re approachable. (I’m not sure how many of you find me annoying in real life (assuming you’re one of those real life people I’ve met, and not some random online stalker). It’s one of those things I really have to go figure out for myself some day.) Whatever I can do through observation (of other people) I will do that way. Asking people for help is something that’s practically beyond my ability. I cannot ask for help, rather literally. This might have been caused by an impression that I’m supposed to be better at everything. Something that is, rather apparently, not true, but it’s an impression I’ve been trying (and failing) to keep up. This probably sprouted from my parents, because… I don’t even know why.

Seems like I’m going off on a tangent, but that’s unimportant. Getting back to unrealistic expectations my parents have of me. There was this one time (look at that number it’s so large) I actually did badly on a maths test (in NUS High), and the teacher (Mr Yee, I think) called my parents because I somehow managed to impress all the teachers sufficiently (Ms Sie also told me about this briefly) in earlier years to make them think I’m some sort of maths genius. It’s cool and all, but honestly I don’t think I’m all that good at maths.

I remember a conversation with Utkarsh along with my roommates and toiletmates last year in hostel (holy shit I actually remember stuff from those dark ages) and then suddenly in came a mention of me being good at maths. Of course I tried to deny that, not out of some false sense of modesty, but lack of self-confidence. Utkarsh denied that, and thought I was actually good. In all honesty, I don’t think I’m better than Utkarsh. Really. You know, I have so many cool classmates around me who actually have accomplished things, and I have pretty much nothing to my name. What do a bunch of random blog posts amount to? (I’m probably nearing the thousand mark if I haven’t already hit it; over nine thousand if you count microblog posts) They’re (this might include you if you’re not a random online stalker) all people who have actively done stuff in their fields of interest, and what am I doing here? Wasting time writing blog posts, here or on /a/ or /g/ or whichever other boards on 4chan I post on.

And anime. I’m not actually going to try denying that I’ve formed some sort of addiction out of it. But part of the main reason I still watch anime isn’t so much enjoying the actual content as discussing it with /a/… yeah, whatever happened to trying to not interact with people? Thing is, with 4chan’s anonymity, I get to post whatever I want, and if I happen to be wrong (note: I hardly ever troll) there are no bad effects. The “downside” is that if I’m right I get no recognition… which isn’t all that bad either, because it prevents me from getting conceited (not sure if this is the right word to use here) and letting this correctness get to my head. With real life, unless I’m interacting with strangers I’ll with all likelihood never have to see again, I’m rather picky with my words. I’ll try to act in a socially acceptable manner. Don’t give me that bullshit Star Wars quote about how “there is no try”, because trying is all I can do with all this autism.

Okay, now that I actually am pouring out my thoughts onto a blog post it seems less coherent than I’d like it to be. Doing this has been something that I’ve been thinking about for quite some time (mere days actually, compared to parts of this post which have been tumbling around in my head for years), but I just failed to bother with it.

Anyway I was rewatching Digimon recently (well, third season last year, fourth near the start of this year, first a few weeks back, second a few days ago), because I wanted to relive my childhood before I die (figuratively, but a literal interpretation isn’t out of the question). (Actually no I’m just really childish and I like Digimon. There, I said it.) You know that genius character in the second season? The guy who tortures Digimon for the sake of seeing them suffer? I feel like that guy (well, until he got his inevitable Heel Face Turn because this a children’s cartoon). It was a bit painful watching it because it’s a children’s cartoon because it forced me to introspect and think about myself. You know, the same reason I watch anime (and other shows) instead of being involved in real life, the main reason alluded to two paragraphs up: escapism. This I’m not going to deny either. I hate reality. I hate being bound by society. I hate being expected to understand what to do when I can’t because of my autism.

And about that autism… it seems like I was never actually diagnosed with Aspergers. Or autism, for that matter. The trip to a psychiatrist about a decade ago (rounding up) was apparently inconclusive. However for all intents and purposes I can be treated as having full-on autism. And probably a few other mental disorders but I’m not all that into self-diagnosis.

Back to rambling about convocation, at any rate. Mr Ku helped pay for the deposit for the dress, so I owe him $50 as of now, because I didn’t turn up at school (and can’t pay it off) since I went for the rehearsal last Monday, the second half of which I skipped, because that chem teacher (I think his name is Wong, but I can’t really remember) is annoying. The only reason I even bothered going was because Mr Ku called some days prior informing me of my required presence at the rehearsals, and he had some other issues to settle with me (probably regarding eSpace being shit (did I ever mention that I locked out all the Y1 and 2 students once just to demonstrate how broken it is)). Apparently, those issues were never discussed, at least not during the period of time I was still in school. I have no idea how important or unimportant they were, but if they have a lower priority than the convocation rehearsal they can’t be that important.

Speaking of priority, I haven’t done anything for college application which a lot of people in my level consider high priority. Surprising eh? Honestly I don’t care. I’m not really intending to go to university. I have nothing going for me in life; I don’t even know why I’m still alive. Or why I try to be alive. Must be that animal instinct in me. People seem to assume that I must go to university, and while I mentally question their premises on which such assumptions are based I don’t actually voice out these questions, simply because I can’t predict how they’d react. I treat predictability with extreme importance, because I like to know what I should do ahead of time.

(Going back to off-topic mode again, so it seems.)

As you should know, I’m in the Chess Club. I haven’t attended any sessions for the whole of the second semester this year, but I’ve managed almost perfect attendance for past years (I think I skipped once or twice). I don’t really like playing chess though, partly because I really suck at it (I can’t remember the last time I won, if that’s any indication). One time I played chess in primary school with a friend (except I don’t even contact him now; I don’t even contact anybody from primary school) he mentioned I played defensively. And earlier this year, playing against a Y5, he (the Y5) noted that I played safe. The way I play chess pretty much reflects how I handle reality. I like planning stuff out, and hoping that things go keikaku doori. And considering how much I lose in chess, things don’t always go exactly as planned. Oh hey I found a quote on my previous blog:

I don’t consider a lot of things. When I play chess, I have an awkward tendency to lose to just about anybody except the lousiest, due to my incredibly linear-like train of thought. In other words, I don’t expect what I don’t expect (tautology), and what I expect tends to hit reality by sheer luck.

And another one, which I was planning on elaborating on but I guess past me is a pretty cool guy so I’ll quote him instead (note this is the paragraph right after the previous quote in the original blog post; sure is serious preemption skills there, past me):

I have been extremely lucky in my daily activities. It’s the kind that anything at least as lucky as that is probably only shared by one permille of the human population. This crazy luck has very obvious drawbacks. First off, the amount of luck I have now is mostly decorrelated with my luck in the future, which could be a bad thing since my dependence on this luck is annoyingly huge.

Funny thing is that even up to now I’ve been “lucky” in pretty much everything I’ve been doing which makes that decorrelatedness suspect. Maybe I’m subconsciously filtering out all the bad parts of my life, but things have been happening really sporadically. The entire reason I even got an ARP to do was because Utkarsh just happened to mention me not having an ARP to Ms Sie (she also told me this during that meeting) who then did some stuff and I magically got assigned an ARP (which I didn’t take seriously anyway for various reasons, among them not caring about graduation). It all seems so surreal when I think about it.

Okay, back to ranting about elaborate ceremonies and shit because that’s the post title. These events at NUS High have always included some guest of honour, usually some highly ranked person in the board of directors, or from some ministry. And then they’ll give some sort of speech. Some sort of speech that is… highly forgettable. I don’t remember anything of any of the speeches I’ve had to sit through in the past five years. They all go something like “I’m very honoured to be here today blah blah blah NUS High has come a long way blah blah blah [cue for students to fall asleep] blah blah blah Thank you [applause.mp3.wav.ogg.aac.flac]“. Well, fine, that’s about the parts I remember. I don’t think I’ve heard any that were more memorable than that. How would listening to your blabbering benefit us, the audience, in any way?

Ever since about last year I somehow conjured the notion of disliking receiving prizes on stage. I don’t think this set in earlier, but I didn’t have to go on stage for any prize between Y2 and 4, so I can’t really tell. (I don’t think about things until I have to think about them.) I was quite opposed to going on stage for SMO last year, partly because I have to get a blazer (and I can’t ask people for it; see above) and partly because I don’t know what it’d be like (also because I can’t just ask people). I went anyway, and… I don’t even remember what happened there. Maybe I was too nervous because blazer. It’s like… well it’s not like you’d understand unless you’re also somewhat autistic, in which case I don’t have to explain this to you because this should already have happened to you. I also went this year, but with my parents. Again I didn’t feel like going, but this year I didn’t have to get a blazer (because I did relatively poorly), and my parents actually came. (They didn’t come last year for reasons I forget, but it’s probably because one of them was overseas and the other had work to do. (These happen depressingly often.)) I have to put on a front just for them!

My parents’ impression of me probably differs strongly from your impression, regardless of whether you’re an online stalker or someone I know in real life (or both). I act very differently depending on who my audience is; reiterating, I act in a way that has predictable results. This forces me to lie (as in deceit, not being in a horizontal orientation) a lot. Sometimes when I come to a junction where I get to choose whether to lie or be truthful I cannot predict what would happen on one route. Well, regardless of who you are, I’ve probably lied to you a lot. I haven’t been entirely truthful on this blog either, because people I know IRL read this. If something’s going to affect my life, I can’t afford to be risky.

My impression of what others’ impression of me is that I’m shrouded in mystery. Maybe I’m just making myself sound cool. That’s probably the case actually. I don’t know how others view me. Which is a big problem, because I base all my decisions on how others would react, and their impression of me affects that.

Well enough hurfing for now. I think I’ve decided to go for convocation… iff my parents make me go. Hopefully that doesn’t happen, because I really don’t want to go. I haven’t told them anything yet though, which makes me uncertain of everything that could happen later.

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